This Utah Diné woman tells a story with every beaded pet collar she makes

For many Indigenous people, the art of beadwork is a way to tell stories, connect with their culture and pass down traditions.

But, for Mickaela Allison, who is Navajo (Diné), the cultural art form became a “way to kind of survive.”

In 2020, Allison was living in Salem, Oregon, far from her family in Mapleton. It was her first time living out of state and the COVID-19 pandemic was raging across the world.

When her mother Barbara Allison came to visit her one weekend, she brought along a beaded collar for one of Mickaela’s dogs, Ashkii.

“[It] had all the fire colors, because he’s a little feisty dude, like the reds, oranges, yellows and black,” Allison said. Along with it, her mother brought a shoebox full of various colored strings, needles, beads and a loom.

“My mom is the one who taught me how to do beadwork, and she just said, ‘If you’re bored, you can just try beading again,’” Allison said.

Allison learned loom beading at eight years old.

“Loom beading with seed beads wasn’t super Navajo-based,” Allison said. “It was all given through trading and bartering way back when. So it’s fairly new for the Navajo people to be beading.”

When Allison realized that people were interested in her pet collars on social media, she decided to start her small business — Keiki’s Collection. Soon after, she had an overflow of orders.

At Keiki’s Collection, Allison, who is “born for the bitter water people and from the salt people clan,” handcrafts Navajo beaded pet collars for customers across the world — from places like the United States to the United Kingdom, to Costa Rica and Dubai.

“I learned everything from my mom … she makes all of our cultural regalia,” Allison, who moved back to Utah in 2021, said. “She always taught me and my siblings the importance of holding on to our culture.”

Each collar Allison beads is customized and personal to the pet it’s for, with handcrafted designs in bright colors. It takes her anywhere from one to four hours to finish creating a collar, depending on the size and intricacy.

Through crafting the collars, Allison says she is able to tell a story.

“There’s storytelling in the beadwork,” she said, “With my collars, I make it a point to have each collar custom. I want the owner … to have a connection with the collars that I make.”

Allison receives her orders through direct messages, (she calls her social media platforms her “trading post”) and the format allows her to collect information from customers to help capture the story she wants to tell through the collar — things like the pet’s name or personality traits, if they have a tribal affiliation, photos of the pet, if there’s something significant about the owner.

“I like to get a full story and understanding,” she said.

“A lot of the time [customers] want to utilize their tribal flag in the colors or the symbolism of the tribal flag, or a story that they’ve had passed down,” she said. “They want hummingbirds or butterflies on the collar, or eagle feathers as a sign of protection on the collar … I get to see insight about the importance of their pet.”

Her biggest seller is her friendship bracelet: a matching bracelet for you and collar for your pet.

Allison also tells the story of her own pets through her business. She was selected to learn how to rebrand with Adobe CoCreate. (Her business was previously called Avie Daisy Designs, in honor of both her grandmothers.)

Creating collars for her business is her “favorite hobby” as Allison puts it, since she works full-time with youth in her community at the Promise South Salt Lake Best Buy Teen Tech Center.

Keiki (which means ‘child’ in Hawaiian) is also the name of Maltese Chihuahua mix Allison had. Keiki died while Allison was living in Oregon.

“During the rebrand, Keiki played a big part in bringing so much joy and balance into my life from up above, that I really felt the need to honor her,” Allison said.

Allison creates each collar with “hozho” — a word that means “peace, beauty and harmony.”

“When you have hozho in your life, you’re living a good, balanced, harmonious lifestyle,” she said. “When I’m creating the collars, only good, positive thoughts are going into the process of my needle going into the bead and my beads connecting to the loom.”